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...Last year, Davis led an eleven-hour filibuster — that’s where the sneakers came in handy — to block legislation that would ban abortion after 20 weeks and require abortion clinics to meet the same standards that hospital-style surgical centers do.

This was all going on against the backdrop of the sensational Kermit Gosnell case in Pennsylvania. Gosnell ran a bloody, filthy “clinic” where he performed late-term abortions with a barbarity you’d expect to find in a Saw movie. Sometimes he’d “snip” the spines of fully-delivered babies with a pair of scissors. His instruments were so unsanitary that some women got STDs from them. Cat feces was a common sight on the procedure-room floors....

....Working on that theory, The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack caught up with Davis last August to ask her a few questions.

McCormack noted that once you got past the squalor and filth of the clinic, Gosnell’s illegal late-term abortions weren’t all that different from legal late-term abortions in other states. “What is the difference . . . ,” McCormack asked, “between legal abortion at 23 weeks and what Gosnell did? Do you see a distinction between those two [acts]?”

“I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case,” Davis replied. “But I do know that it happened in an ambulatory surgical center. And in Texas changing our clinics to that standard obviously isn’t going to make a difference.”

She should have stopped with “I don’t know what happened in the Gosnell case” — because in the words of the grand-jury report, the “abhorrent conditions and practices inside Gosnell’s clinic [were] directly attributable to the Pennsylvania Health Department’s refusal to treat abortion clinics as ambulatory surgical facilities.”

So the one thing she claimed to know wasn’t true. Also, what curious incuriosity. If you were suddenly a national leader on an issue you felt passionately about, wouldn’t you want to know what happened in a case that cuts to the heart of your cause?...